It investigates “alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media-cultural condition…” (Huhtamo & Parikka,Media Archaeology, 2011 ).

And Geert Lovink says,

‘Media archaeology is first and foremost a methodology, a hermeneutic reading of the “new” against the grain of the past, rather than a telling of the history of technologies from past to present. No comprehensive overview of the media archaeology approach is yet available, but we could mention a few scholars, such as Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Werner Nekes, Jona- than Crary, Katherine Hayles, Werner Künzel, Avital Ronell, Christoph Asendorf, Erkki Huhtamo, Paul Virilio and others.’
(Lovink, My First Recession – Critical Internet Culture in Transition, 2003)

’In his Archaeology of the Cinema C. W. Ceram states: “What matters history is not whether certain chance discov- eries take place, but whether they take effect.”4 When Hertz experimented with electromagnetic waves he meant to prove Maxwell’s mathematical calcu- lations of the electromagnetic field; almost by accident he thereby practically invented radio transmission technology.5 How can we write media history when media systems create their Eigenzeit?’ (Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013, p57)

We can say that Media Archaeology is not a single methodology, but an orientation – a direction which is common to a loose group of researchers (a lot of whom are German and related to a particular kind of german media theory and philosophy) and a particular flavour of research. If methodology is ‘a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity’ (OED) then really Media Archaeology exists at a level of abstraction above this. It is an associated set of theories, methods, methodologies and skills which emphasise a close reading of technology itself, not just in its ability to be a cultural phenomenon. As Friedrich Kittler says:

‘History is not a list of, “directors, stars, studios and celebrities, which in the end remains organised around a series of titles” ‘ (Kittler, Optical Media, p. 26).

As Ernst summarises,

‘Equally close to disciplines that analyze material (hard- ware) culture and to the Foucauldian notion of the “archive” as the set of rules governing the range of what can be verbally, audiovisually, or alphanumeri- cally expressed at all, media archaeology is both a method and an aesthetics of practicing media criticism, a kind of epistemological reverse engineering, and an awareness of moments when media themselves, not exclusively humans anymore, become active “archaeologists” of knowledge.’ (Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013, p55)

And for example Lori Emmerson says,

‘my sense is that as you use a machine like the Altair, your contemporary laptop gradually loses its aura of magic or mystery and you start to palpably experience the ways in which your laptop consists of layer upon layer of interfaces that remove you ever more from the way your computer actually works. For another thing, more often than not, using the Altair opens up the possibility for reseeing the past—what if the computer industry took a slightly different turn and we ended up with Altair-like devices without screens or mice? And therefore using this obsolete machine also opens up the possibility of reseeing the present and the future’ “As if, or, Using Media Archaeology to Reimagine Past, Present, and Future: An Interview with Lori Emerson,” International Journal of Communication Vol. 10 (June 2016)

Although he is not usually referred to in the ‘canon’ of MA, we could look at Matthew Kirschenbaum’s archival practice with electronic literature as an example of MA in practice.

Meanwhile Wolfgang Ernst frequently uses the spatial and temporal specifics of technological kinds of writing to discuss and problematise the way we understand time and in particular historical narrative.

‘…the historical mode of describing temporal processes has been confronted with alternative modelings of time, When it comes to describing media in time, this aporia becomes crucial, since one can no longer simply subject media processes to a literary narrative without fundamentally misreading and misrepresenting their Eigenzeit. Historical media narratives take place in imaginary time. Storage technologies, on the other hand, take place in the symbolic temporal order…’ (Ernst, in Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 2011, p. 242)

‘But is radio, when playing, ever in a historical state? Is it not in fact always in a present state? The medium only appears to conform to the logic of historical epochal concepts; in actuality, it undermines this logic and sets a different temporal economy. For example, an original record- ing resonating today from an old tube radio, provided it can still run on 220 volts, hardly makes history audible. A tube radio thus practices compressed time with respect to our sensory perception, as long as this is not overlaid with “historical meaning,” which corresponds not to the actual media work- ings of radio but rather to the logic of inscribed historiography.’ (Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013, p159)

Ernst makes the point that our language and methods of discussing, and modelling time in terms of historical narratives just aren’t up to the task of considering what technological (particularly electronic and computational) media actually do.

He also has a lot of interesting things to say about counting,

‘The numerical order, the basis of digital technologies, has always already been performed as a cultural practice before becoming technically materialized.’ (Telling vs Counting in, Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013, p147)

To tell, we learn, as a transitive verb, means not only “to give a live account in speech or writing of events or facts” (that is, to tell a story) but also “to count things” (to tell a rosary, for example). The very nature of digital operations and telling thus coincide.’ (Telling vs Counting in, Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013, p147-8)

The conjunction between telling stories and counting time is more than just a word game: verbs like conter, contar, raccontare, erzählen, and to tell are testimonies to a way of perceiving realities that oscillates between narrative and statistics.’ (Telling vs Counting in, Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013, p149)

I found this work (actually earlier published versions of this work) extremely compelling during the early stages of making this piece, Mark Inscriber.

And (though he doesn’t use this term himself) we could think of our own Diego Trujillo-Pisanty’s most excellent ‘This Tape Will Self-destruct‘.

In Pedagogy

We’ve previously talked about Julian Oliver’s work. He and Danja Vasiliev have a series of workshops around understanding network fundamentals. Jussi Parka points out that,

‘We can speculate that such ideas and practices as Weise7- group’s are an indirect response to what Geert Lovink (2012: 22) has called the need for ‘materialist (read: hardware- and software- focused) and affect-related theory.’ In this case, theory is not executed only in the normal written format but as engineered situations: the other material infrastructures and modes of expression in which power operates, from code to networks.’ Parikka (critically engineered wireless politics, 2013)

He notes that,

‘In real time computing systems, however, the collection, organization and storage of information leads directly to action, to integrated surveillance and control over the object environment. This dynamic marriage of information and control in real time systems is a fusion of knowledge and action, and, through directed action in real time, information is expressed as power. (Sackman, 1968: 1492) (in Parikka,critically engineered wireless politics, 2013)

These workshops (and others like them) are oriented towards a kind of techno-politics based on hacking intervention and self-enablement (however genuine this ends up being). There’s a like-spirited endeavour in this paper which I saw present in Xcoax – a symposium you should all make yourselves aware of.

Memory

What does the Sack piece tell us about the way that memory has been conceived of in the history of computer science?

This is how we combine single bits to create more and more memory. But what we are interested in is how, on a the level of both logic and components, this works.

Latches and Flip flops

Latches and flip flops (we can talk about the difference – it depends who you ask) are an essential part of computer memory. Some version of this circuit is inside the most fundamental aspects of computer memory. They are therefore massively significant in thinking about what we mean when we say ‘computer memory’. We are going to build a state saving circuit ( a flip flop) and use it to explore what we do and don’t know about digital memory and how we can use that as part of a research and creative methodology.

How can we combine two NOR gates into an OR gate? Simple (ish)! We invert it! See a bunch of examples here. Take one and explain it to your partner!

Step one: Building a NOR gate

This circuit uses transistors

Transistors are manufactured in different shapes but they have three leads (legs).
The BASE – which is the lead responsible for activating the transistor.
The COLLECTOR – which is the positive lead.
The EMITTER – which is the negative lead.

Look at the diagram below. How should we wire up our NORs to make a flip flop?

2 NORs making a flip flop. CC wikimedia

It works, what next?

A flip flop gives us a single bit, held in memory (as long as there is power). Here are somethings I want us to discuss:

what is the significance of holding one piece of memory – what can that memory mean? What can it do? Wittgenstein asks of a man given a piece of paper which asks for 5 apples, the following ‘But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’? No such thing was in question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used.’ What do we mean when we say a bit ‘means’?

Now imagine we have an encoding system for that bit. e.g. 0 = ‘apple’, 1=’pear’. How does that affect the above?

Stepping outside this question for a moment – how many real-world applications for the storage of one bit of information can you think of? How about for 2 or 3 bits?

If we all combined our individual bits into a large register – what could we store? How could we act?

But Why? Let’s talk about that

What elements of media archaeology (if any) do you identify in your work?

What would be the impact of this method?

Returning to our project, how could you take this exploration of digital memory further, how would you develop it?

Suggested readings

What is Media Archaeology? Parikka, 2012, Polity

Media Archaeology, Huhtamo & Parikka (eds), 2010

Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst, 2012, University of Minnesota Press

The author of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong, lived in the chaos of the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties. At that time social unrest grew and peasant uprisings came one after another. After many years of war, Zhu Yuanzhang overthrew the Yuan Dynasty and established the Ming dynasty. During this period, many people were homeless, including Luo Guanzhong who wrote Zaju and scripts for story-telling. Because he lived at the bottom of society, he understood and was familiar with what people were suffering. Hoping for social stability and people living and working in peace and contentment, he created this historical novel using the historical facts of the late Eastern Han Dynasty.

Journey to the West (1558)

The author Wu Cheng’en lived in the late Ming dynasty. At that time, the social situation was very different from that at the beginning of the founding period. Political contradictions, national contradictions and the internal contradictions of the ruling class were intensified and sharpened. After the ideological and cultural enlightenment thought expanded and the liberation of human nature increasingly flourished, and fiction and opera creation entered a period of full prosperity. In terms of the economy, capitalist started to bud.

“Journey to the West” has a pantheon of gods and demons: One of the gods in the pantheon is lead by the Jade Emperor. This hierarchical system, which is in fact a political system that reflects the reality of the Ming dynasty. In this system, the ruler living a privileged life, and their status is tenured and hereditary.

The demons in the book are a reflection of the common people, who can be divided into three categories: The first one is from within the ruling group, who made a mistake and were relegated to the lower realms. The second one is the good citizens and the third category is composed of purely bad people. This series of characters mirrors ‘a good deed begets good and an evil deed yields evil’, which reflects the author’s notion of the boundary of good and evil which can not be blurred.

Romeo and Juliet (1595)

‘Romeo and Juliet’ is the first mature tragedy that Shakespeare created. Because the work is filled with a “spring and youth” atmosphere, it is a called romantic love tragedy. This work was written in the late 16th century, when the Renaissance began to sprout. At that time the United Kingdom was in the heyday of Queen Elizabeth’s rule, the regnum was steady, the economy was prosperous. Shakespeare was full of confidence in the achievement of the ideal of humanism in society. Thus the work is filled with optimistic mood. The emerging bourgeoisie as a new social force on the stage of history not only meant that the economic base, class structure changed, but also the superstructure changed.

The bourgeoisie brought its own outlook on the world into history, and during this period it focused on humanism. Humanists advocated the “people” as the center, strongly opposed to the dictatorship of theocracy and the authority of the church, and demanded human rights and dignity. The basic conflict in the book is not only the contradiction between the two feudal families, but also the contradictory struggle between the two social forces, which were the social roots of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

Hamlet (1601)

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Britain was in the transitional period of the feudal system to the capitalist system, which was a great turning point in British history. During the boom of Elizabeth’s rule, the bourgeoisie supported the monarchy, and the monarchy used the bourgeoisie. As the political situation was relatively stable, social productivity saw rapid development. Although the development of these emerging capitalist relations of production accelerated the collapse of the feudal society, it still relied on the brutal exploitation of the peasantry. During the reign of James I, the autocratic monarchy was further pursued, and the resistance of the bourgeoisie and the working people was vigorously suppressed. Social contradictions further intensified, it fundamentally shook the feudal order, and the prepared conditions for 17th century British bourgeois revolution.

‘Hamlet’ is the ‘epitome’ of this era. The struggle between Hamlet and Claudius is a symbol of the struggle of the emerging bourgeois humanists and the reactionary feudal kingship.

The Renaissance movement brought Europe into the awakening of the ‘people’, and belief in God began to waver. This is the great liberation of thought which promoted the great development of social civilization; the other hand, especially to the late Renaissance, followed by the spread of desires and social confusion. Faced with such a chaotic era, the middle-aged Shakespeare, wanted to show the hidden trouble behind the ideal and development.

The Outlaws of the Marsh (1630)

The Outlaws of the Marsh is the first book in the history of Chinese literature that directly describe the main contradiction of the feudal society – the peasant class and the landlord class contradictions on a large scale. The work depicts a vigorous peasant revolutionary struggle, showing a magnificent scene of struggle for life. The novel exposes the darkness of the feudal society, the evil of the ruling class, and reveals that the social roots of the peasant uprising are cruel feudal oppression and exploitation, praising the justice of the peasant revolutionary struggle. The novel describes the representatives of the ruling class from the Gao Qiu to Zhenf Zhu, they formed a dark ruling network, which brought great disaster to people. The novel also shapes the heroic image of Li Kui, Lu Zhishen, Wu Song and Lin Chong, and praises the rebellious spirit of the peasant uprising heroes.

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1690)

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio is a series of classical short stories which is unique and artistic. Most of the stories are tell of ghosts and monsters, but the content is deeply rooted in real life, and euphemistically reflect the social contradictions of that time. The stories can be classified into 5 categories. The first one is the stories which reflect the social darkness, expose and oppose the feudal ruling class oppression. The second one is against the feudal marriage, criticises feudal ethical education, and praises young men and women pursue pure love and fight for freedom and happiness. The third category is to expose and criticize the corruption of the imperial examination system. The fourth one is to praise the oppressed people with the spirit of the struggle against authority. The last one is the stories which educate people to be honest, helpful, hardworking, etc..

An interesting phenomenon is that in the Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, there are many female roles. Even though the female images is shaped from the perspective of maleism, not completely divorced from feudal thought, it gives the female image new connotations.

Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

The author of Gulliver’s Travels is Jonathan Swift. During the period of 1710 to 1714, he was appointed as a public relations officer of Robert Harry and Henry St John’s Tory Party. But later, the parties alternated, the Whigs came to power. Swift wrote the book in order to reflect the social contradictions of England in the first half of the 18th century, criticize the decadence of the British ruling group, expose the exploitation of the bourgeoisie at that time, and sharply refute all attempts to defend the social system at that time and oppose the wars of aggression and colonialism. Later, the author also went to Ireland to teach. Ireland was subject to the high pressure of England rule, so that the author reflected the decline of Irish agriculture through the third island travels in the book.

A Dream of Red Mansions (1791)

‘A Dream of Red Mansions’ describes Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu’s love tragedy, and the declining process of four big families, reflecting the feudal society brutal class oppression, exposing the darkness and decay of the feudal system, showing the inevitable trend of collapse of feudal society and proposing the ideals with the hazy democratic thinking. Besides, the praise for the girls and the sympathy and respect for the weak in the book laid the foundation for the later liberation of the women, marriage autonomy and today’s feminist movement.

Pride and prejudice (1813)

Austin was unmarried and lived in a relatively wealthy family in a rural town. So that in her work, there are no major social contradictions, just a peaceful life of landlords, pastors and other people. From the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century, ‘sentimental novels’ and ‘Gothic novels’ filled the British literary world. However, Pride and Prejudice was anomalous and shows the daily life of the British middle class in a country who’s life had not yet been hit by the capitalist industrial revolution.

The work is perhaps one of the greatest love novels in the world, and it ‘tells you that women have the right to live better, and should not think of what the women should take.’

Wuthering Heights (1847)

Emilie Bronte lived in thirty years of social turbulence in Britain. Capitalism was developing and increasingly exposed to its inherent flaws. There were sharp contradictions between labor and capital and the unemployed workers were poor. Besides, a large number of child laborers were cruelly tortured to death and the British government restricted the democratic reform struggle and the workers’ movement. People’s spirits suffered from the intense oppression. Humanity as twisted without mercy. Another feature of the time was patriarchy. At that time, the Victorian period, the noble class were enormously proud of their success. Status is first, money is god and women’s marriage, to a large extent, determines their fate.

The work is mainly carried out to explore human nature for people to realize that if there is no humanity, the world will become ugly, shrill and painful. The grotesque love story exposes the evil of patriarchal society and criticisms toward disrespect of the female.

It took me a long time to figure out which field should I research, which I’m turely interested in. Even thought I’m not an advanced English speaker, I still wanted to explore the relationships between Chinese and English, which leads me to study the field of Comparative literature. Besides, the collaborative project – making a dashboard in order to visualize the data that we did during the class inspire me to discover more about information visualization. After the initial idea generated, I did some research in terms of these two field, and think about how to integrate them.

After that, I aimed that my project would focus on one of the earlist diagram to illustrate data – pie chart, researching the potential of it.

The launch went pretty well, I think. Despite some last-minute hiccups, everything was in place on time. Four booklets, deriving their contents from four different mediums (music, video, games and literature), fifty-two different poems (some of them shorter than others, admittedly, although the short ones were often the hardest thanks to the obscure restrictions imposed upon them).

Feels like quite an achievement, and having something gallery-worthy is a first as well. I’m satisfied that I managed to come up with something with visual and physical elements that made it worth displaying in a fine art gallery context, while still staying true to my own interests and creative practice.

Whether I handled the display aspects well is another matter – there are definitely a few things I would have done differently given hindsight & time. It’s possible that it wasn’t 100% clear that my exhibit was part of the show and ignored it, but it’s also possible that it simply wasn’t audiovisual enough for a fine art audience. I definitely overestimated people’s interest in coming over to check out the shelves and explore the details hidden there, but there is still a week to go, so it could well still find its audience.

If what I made was a puzzle (fine art will always be a puzzle to me, even/especially the stuff that I like), and I do think it has a lot of puzzle-like aspects to it, then not that people really tried to solve it. There were just too many pieces, and despite my best efforts most of them weren’t very eye-catching. But I think I’m fine with that – the body of work I managed to create for this project is very satisfying and useful to me, and as a first foray into exhibiting my art I think was a great experiment.

Changelogs
Centos – derived by taking lines from various sources and recombining them
Definitional Literature – derived by substituting each word with in the text its dictionary definition
Redaction – derived by blacking out certain parts of the original text
Acrostic/Mesostic/Telostic – poems where the first/middle/last letters spell out a particular word or phrase (often used in combination)
‘Titling’ – taking the title (and first line) of the work from another work
Abecedarian – in which each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet (here combined with an acrostic)

Oulipean Pataphysical Plagiarising NonsenseCentos – derived by taking lines from various sources and recombining them
Redaction – derived by blacking out certain parts of the original text
‘Find-and-replace’ – derived by replacing the proper nouns of a work with the proper nouns of another work
N+7 – derived by replacing each noun in the text with the next noun in the Dictionary but seven
Golden Shovel – derived by taking each word from the source poem as the final word of each line
Pataphor – derived by replacing non-figurative language with metaphor, then replacing each metaphor with pataphor (i.e. extrapolating it to a new, more literal sense)

*Finally got around to posting this now that the blog is back up and I’m not as swamped with the project itself.

Filming has finally been done. Given only a week in the sound studio to do what I needed, every hour counted, and it virtually became my home for that time.

The completed first set, and final models in place while filming the first “act.”

The second set, featuring the two characters Enki and Ada, as well as the scrapyard of all the failed test subjects, both in real life and in-universe.

Final set up for the second stage.

For the most part, though hectic and a little tedious at times, filming went rather smoothly. Another friend, an actual photographer, came in early during my week time limit and showed me some pointers on using the equipment I had on loan. As it turned out, my lighting was not idea, and this meant I needed to reshoot the first three scenes as their lighting quality was both bad and inconsistent with the rest of the film. Though some corners were skipped, and some scenes could have perhaps used more frames, I am at least content in knowing that I have plenty of material to actually make the film itself.